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jpletcher1Flag for United States of America

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Windows 2008 shares on iSCSI target disappear after reboot

I have a Windows 2008 server using the MS iSCSI initiator to connect to our Equallogic SAN.  About 50% of the time when I reboot the server the shares on the iSCSI  target disappear.  The data and folders are there, just not the share.  The shares on the local disks are fine.  

I think the randomness of whether the shares disappear or not might be if they happen to be in use at the time of reboot, but I'm not 100% sure.  
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mwoolman

Basically this is a timing issues. The iscsi lun isnt quite available at the time the sares are being recreated after the server restarts.

Here is a microsoft article on how to fix the problem. It has worked for me in the past.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/870964
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Is the only part of this article to follow the piece about making the lanmanserver service start after the MSISCSI service?  The other steps don't seem to apply to the iSCSI initiator in Windows 2008.
Admittedly I have only had to do this on a 2003 server.  However, it was my understanding from the article that you should be able to do those same items on a 2008 server as well to make the loon to the tarets persistent.
The only option off there I could do was this line to make the iSCSI initiator service a dependency of the Server service:

Type sc config LanManServer depend= MSiSCSI

When I did that and rebooted, everything blew up and I couldn't even get my profile when I logged in.  After some research I found that by typing the line above, it replaces the existing dependencies that exist for the Server service rather than just add to them, so I had to add back in a couple dependencies.  I found that article here:

http://blog.chrislehr.com/2011/02/server-service-error-2-system-cannot.html

Coincidentally, that article was the same scenario I have where someone followed the MS article to make the iSCSI initiator a dependency of the Server service.

So the issue is definitely that the shares are being applied before the iSCSI storage is showing up, but adding the iSCSI initiator as a dependency of the Server service doesn't fix the issue.  If after everything is started, I restart the Server service, it puts the shares and permissions back on.
I should also mention, this all worked for about a year just fine, and then this started happening.  I'm not sure what triggered it.  Maybe a Windows update... In any event, the symptoms are what I list above.  
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kevinhsieh
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Yes, I thought of this kind of solution, but hoped there was something more permanent.  We are using basic disks.  It could very well be that the system starts up slower now than when first installed.  Just hoping for someting more of a real fix rather than work-around.  Thanks for the comment though.
This works, but is more of a work-around than a solution.